Memphis Royalty

For using the power of music to shape our community, Royal Studios’ Boo Mitchell is our 2019 Memphian of the Year.

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As I sit with Boo Mitchell and his wife, Tanya, at La Guadelupana, one of their favorite local eateries, Boo grows reflective about music, the sea in which he swims every day. “I always like to produce artists who write their own stuff,” he says, “because the songwriting helps to define their persona more than somebody else’s. One of my last Willie Mitchell lessons was when Pop goes, ‘Boo, we’re not selling music, we’re selling feelings.’ People buy songs because they feel a certain way. So the relatability is key. When people write songs from a place of honesty, those are always the best songs.”

It’s a comment that sums up Boo’s place in the city of Memphis perfectly. For he’s not just a luminary in a city with a tradition of hit records, but in the city that’s consistently put heart and soul — and individuality — at the core of its musical being. As much as any Memphian today, Boo Mitchell embodies the openness and diversity that thrive here.

“Pop,” of course, is Boo’s grandfather, Willie Mitchell, who raised his daughters’ sons, Boo and his brother Archie, as his own children, becoming Boo’s father in every meaningful sense, even bestowing the family name on him. And though Willie passed away in 2010, the father-son bond between them is revealed in nearly everything Boo does to this day.

This is most apparent in the day-to-day management of Royal Studios, a former cinema built in 1915, which was remade into a recording studio in 1956 by Hi Records’ president Joe Cuoghi and his partners. By the early 1960s, local trumpeter and bandleader extraordinaire Willie Mitchell was brought in as a producer and artist, and Hi enjoyed hit after hit. By 1970, when Cuoghi died, Willie had become so integral to operations that he was the de facto head of both Hi Records and Royal Studios. By then, singer Al Green was already a Hi artist, and through the ensuing decade became one of the most popular recording stars of all time.

And while Willie was busy being the architect of the Hi Records sound for Al Green and many other artists, Boo, born in 1971, was immersed in that milieu, absorbing everything, both in the studio and at home.

“Most of my piano playing I learned from my dad,” Boo recalls. “Every night he’d come home, I’d be messing around on the piano, and he’d come lean over my shoulder, those whiskers hitting me, and show me some stuff. See, Pop invented the Memphis Sound, but he was still from this jazz background. So he’d show me these chords and it looked like his hands were just spread across the whole piano. I was like, ‘Damn, that’s badass. Hold it! Wait a minute!’ So as I grew up, when he wrote songs, I’d sit there and watch him. And I learned how to play that way. Whatever song he was writing, that’s what I knew how to play.”

And Boo was learning the technical side of the music business as well. “I have very vivid memories of 1975, for some reason,” he says. “The control room was upstairs at that time. And I remember when Star Wars came out in 1977. I was about 6, and I remember, the Millennium Falcon cockpit looked just like the control room upstairs. I was like, ‘Holy crap, this looks like where Pop works! I think I wanna be doing that!’ The tape machine transport basically looked like R2D2. It was a little guy with all the lights.”

By age 16, Boo scored his first paid session as a keyboard player on Al Green’s Grammy-winning “As Long As We’re Together.” That same year, he formed a rap group with his brother called the M-Team, the first rap group from Memphis to release a full-length album and to have a video played on MTV. It was a natural move for Boo, who had been a fan of hip-hop for years by then.

“I’ve always liked different music,” he recalls. “When I was in about fifth grade, my playlist was Gap Band IV, Queen, Toto, AC/DC, Rick James, and [Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s] ‘The Message.’ I remember reciting it at dinner. Pop goes, ‘Man, if you knew your lesson like you knew that, your grades would be better.’ I was like, ‘But Pop, it’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under!’”

When hip-hop luminaries Wu-Tang Clan decided to blend their sample-based approach with live musicians, Royal was where they headed.

Boo’s tastes remain eclectic to this day, which has served him and Royal Studios well. Hip-hop, seemingly a passing fad to Willie, has come to dominate the airwaves and has birthed a whole new Memphis Sound. Though the M-Team tapered off in the early ’90s, other Memphis kids were brewing a heady approach to rap that has kept Memphis at the top of the charts for years. DJ Squeeky, 8Ball & MJG, and various members of Three 6 Mafia (winners of an Academy Award in 2005), who all began making music in the M-Team era, are now celebrated as visionaries. Indeed, Rolling Stone called a decades-old track by Three 6 Mafia co-founder Juicy J “the most influential rap song of 2018,” naming three contemporary artists who have re-sampled it. Meanwhile, Memphis artists since then, from Yo Gotti to BlocBoy JB and Young Dolph, dominate the charts with jams of their own.

The old Memphis Sound has influenced hip-hop more directly as well, with old hits from Stax and Hi regularly sampled to this day. Hip-hop is polarizing for many older listeners, but even the ever-opinionated Willie Mitchell was warming to it by the end of his life. “Pop liked Tupac,” says Boo. “I think Tupac had a B.B. King sample in ‘How Do You Want It?’ That guitar lick from ‘The Thrill Is Gone.’ And Pop used to tell me, ‘I don’t understand a lot of this rap stuff, but that cat Tupac, he’s got some different stuff going on.’”

This bridging of worlds, serving as the keystone that locks together so many facets of Memphis music, makes Boo Mitchell unique in the city’s landscape. And, like his father, he brings to this role a keen sense of civic service. “Watching Pop work helped me learn how to work and carry myself,” he says. “I mean, he made all this amazing music, but one reason was how he treated people.

Willie even produced an album, Art Official Intelligence, by the innovative rappers De La Soul in 2000. “He brought in an organ player and some other things. He was trying to understand hip-hop,” recalls Boo, who has followed that example and run with it. Hip-hop artists themselves are emphatically not polarized when it comes to an appreciation of old-school grooves, like those crafted in Royal Studios, and a number of projects involving Boo Mitchell are the proof.

Take Me to the River, a 2014 film co-produced by Boo, Cody Dickinson (of the North Mississippi Allstars), and others, brought rappers of the current era together with old-school soul stars. Boo engineered some of the sessions himself, including a collaboration between William Bell, one of Stax Records’ first hit makers, and rapper Snoop Dogg. And when hip-hop luminaries Wu-Tang Clan decided to blend their sample-based approach with live musicians, Royal was where they headed. Their recordings from 2013, incorporating original performances captured by Boo as engineer, ultimately wound up on their commercial album, A Better Tomorrow, and the album The Wu – Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, of which only a single copy was manufactured and famously auctioned off to multimillionaire and convicted fraudster Martin Shkreli for $2 million.

Boo’s history with Wu-Tang Clan blossomed again with their appearance at the most recent Mempho Music Festival, an annual event he helps to produce. He counts their performance as one of the highlights of 2019. “Mempho was a big deal this year, bringing Wu-Tang in,” he notes. “One of the coolest things that happened was, they closed their show out with ‘Let’s Stay Together.’ They called me on stage while I was up in the crow’s nest filming them with my phone. All of a sudden I was like, ‘Man, they’re doing ‘Let’s Stay Together! Oh my god!’ Then I hear, ‘Boo! Where’s Boo?’ So that was a cool moment.”

In bringing together the old and the new, one key draw that Boo has used over and over again has been the group now known as the Hi Rhythm Section. Players centered on the Hodges family, and they created the famous grooves of Al Green and other Hi artists. Largely due to the continuity of Royal Studios and Boo’s efforts to incorporate the group into new projects, this group is thriving in the modern era. Though guitarist and songwriter Teenie Hodges passed away in 2014, the ensemble carries on with, as Boo notes, “Charles Hodges, Leroy Hodges, Archie Turner, and sometimes Howard Grimes, when he comes out of retirement. Otherwise, Steve Potts on drums.”

The Hi Rhythm Section’s collaborations go far beyond the blending of the extremes of hip-hop and soul. They can be heard on such albums as The Greatest by Cat Power, and the Grammy-nominated Robert Cray & Hi Rhythm. And when they are recording at Royal, as with the latter album, it is usually Boo behind the board.

This bridging of worlds, serving as the keystone that locks together so many facets of Memphis music, makes Boo Mitchell unique in the city’s landscape. And, like his father, he brings to this role a keen sense of civic service. “Watching Pop work helped me learn how to work and carry myself,” he says. “I mean, he made all this amazing music, but one reason was how he treated people. That was just as important, if not more important, than the music. How he interacted with the musicians, and how everybody looked up to him and respected him. Because of how he carried himself.”

Willie’s humanity and sense of place extended beyond the studio walls. “The neighborhood was always supportive of the studio,” says Boo. “When the riots happened after Dr. King’s assassination, I think my Pop was doing a gig at Disneyland. And he had my grandmother buy a bunch of wine and give it to the winos, and the winos watched the studio while Pop was outta town. When he got back, there were like 20 of them here, all passed out. ‘Oh! Willie, hey! We got your stuff, ain’t nobody touched it!’ Rioters had burnt other businesses. There was a furniture store down the street and the grocery store that had been vandalized and burned, but nobody bothered Royal. And those same guys, when he cut ‘Let’s Stay Together,’ he let them come and watch while they recorded it.”

Today, Boo brings that same spirit to his work with the Memphis chapter of the Recording Academy, the organization that brings us the Grammy Awards. “We have the most geographically diverse chapter,” he notes. “And probably the most diverse chapter by genre, too. Because the Memphis chapter covers West Tennessee, all of Arkansas, all of Mississippi, all of Louisiana, and St. Louis. There’s so much cultural impact from the music of those places. New Orleans, where jazz was invented. The Mississippi Delta spawned the blues. Memphis gave birth to rock and soul. In Louisiana you’ve got zydeco. It’s really a diverse chapter.”

Released late in 2014, “Uptown Funk” occupied the number-one spot in the U.S. charts for more than three months, ultimately being certified 11-times platinum. Combining classic Memphis horn blasts with juicy ’80s synthesizer squalls, it was unmistakably a product of Royal.

Boo keeps busy as an active member of the chapter, making frequent trips to Washington, D.C. to advocate for laws honoring the rights of musicians and producers of music. “Grammys on the Hill had a big win at the end of last year with the passing of the Music Modernization Act [establishing more generous standards for royalties from music streaming services]. But there are still a few issues, like performance royalties for musicians and artists. In every country in the world except for the United States, Afghanistan, North Korea, and China, the background singers, the session musicians, artists, and producers all get paid a performance royalty. Here, only songwriters and publishers get paid. That’s a problem, obviously. And because there’s no reciprocity, our money is being collected in Europe on our behalf but not being sent.

“And then there’s a big problem with credits. If you don’t buy a physical unit, there are no liner notes. And that’s slowly being addressed. There’s a young man from here, Gebre Waddell, from Sound Credit. He’s incredible. He’s streamlining that process and it’s already being implemented.”

Meanwhile, he’s used the power of music to help other causes. “I worked on the Regional One Health One Night Gala. We had Chaka Khan perform! And I produced a show for the United Way of the Mid-South for their 95th Anniversary. They had Carla Thomas, Vaneese Thomas, Hi Rhythm, and Marcus King.”

It has been a busy year for Boo Mitchell, not least because of the constant flow of work coming through the doors. This is partly due to the remarkable success of a record that seemed to fall into Royal Studios’ lap out of nowhere, and it happened at a time when it seemed Royal could get no recognition for its accomplishments. As Boo recalls. “There was this feeling that I wasn’t being appreciated. I had just done all these amazing things, like Boz Scaggs and Keith Richards. I was like, ‘How is this possible? Wu-Tang Clan just recorded here, so how am I doing wrong?’ So it hurt. It was devastating, actually. I believe in God, so I’m praying, and I’m feeling like I’ve been kicked out of heaven or something. Like, ‘What do I have to do to get credit around here?’ And then at the height of all that, here comes Mark Ronson. I was like, ‘Okay, thank you, God. You do still love me.’”

Mark Ronson, of course, was the producer of the Bruno Mars track “Uptown Funk,” and no better boost for Royal Studios could have appeared. Released late in 2014, it occupied the number-one spot in the U.S. charts for more than three months, ultimately being certified 11-times platinum. And, combining classic Memphis horn blasts with juicy ’80s synthesizer squalls, it was unmistakably a product of Royal.

Boo recalls the moment the track came together: “Half of that song was actually written at Royal. I like to think that I contributed that line, ‘Fill my cup, put some liquor in it.’ I’m not claiming any songwriting credit. But it was 4 in the morning. Bruno’s got a plane to catch at 8 or something. And they were hammering out lyrics to ‘Uptown Funk.’ They were like ‘Smooth like...’ and someone yelled, ‘Skippy, man!’ It was Bruno and Phillip Lawrence, those dudes pretty much write all the songs. And they ran out of booze, so I was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna check Pop’s office.’ And right next to his Grammy Trustee Award was this bottle of Four Roses bourbon. It was one of a thousand, signed by the distiller in gold. I just looked at it and said, ‘Sorry Pop, take one for the team.’ So I cracked the top of it, and Bruno’s the first one with a cup, and he was like, ‘Yeah, Boo Mitchell, fill my cup, put some liquor in it!’ So it was 4:30 a.m., and that went in the song!”

Thus did Willie himself contribute posthumously to one of Royal’s biggest hits. Indeed, it marked the first time a Memphian had won a Grammy for Record of the Year. Yet, even now, Royal still retains the half-finished charm of a workshop, or a clubhouse. “It hasn’t changed since 1969. It’s the same,” says Boo. And that goes for much of the studio’s hardware: the piano, the organ, the microphones, and, most of all, the tracking room itself, with bits of insulation still tacked to the walls as Willie left them, as he tuned the acoustics of the space to his liking. The vintage gear and the space are a bigger draw than ever, and Boo has stayed busy this year.

“I made a record with Steve Jordan and some of the Hi Rhythm guys. A posthumous Tony Joe White record. Tony Joe wanted to come and record at Royal with Hi Rhythm, and then he passed away in December of last year. But he had laid out all these songs. Steve talked to his son, Jody, and they had multitrack demos of Tony playing guitar and singing his songs. So we took those and reverse-engineered them and put on drums and bass and organ and everything.

“And I got to record a lot of the soundtrack for Dolemite Is My Name,” directed by Memphian Craig Brewer. “I’ve recorded things for movies before, but that was the first time I got to work on a score with the video screen in the studio and guys playing to it. It was a truly Memphis-centric project, because you had Scott Bomar from Electraphonic, Kevin Houston, me, and we used Matt Ross-Spang’s microphones. So it was a bunch of cool Memphis engineers coming together to make this thing happen, just like it was when my dad was doing stuff in the 1960s and ’70s. He’d go to American and play on records, go to Stax and play on records. Everybody rotated, you know?”

There have been many other projects this past year, including Yebba Smith, Samantha Fisher, Luther Dickinson, Brian Owens, William Bell, and Merilee Rush. But one holds special meaning, though Boo himself had very little to do with it: his son Uriah’s first record. Uriah, like his father and grandfather, can play, sing, and produce, and he put all such skills to use in creating what will be the first major release of the new Royal Records imprint. Indeed, all five of Boo and Tanya’s children are creatively inclined, which bodes well for the ongoing legacy of Royal Studios, and may be the reason it’s one of the oldest continuously operated music recording studios in the world. According to Boo, it all comes down to family.

“It’s family owned and operated. That’s one of the things that’s cool about Royal. The family runs it, all the way down to the kids. My mom Lorraine, my sister Oona, my Aunt Yvonne. Nephews, children. There’s always a Mitchell in the house.”

That goes hand-in-hand with Boo Mitchell’s love of Memphis, and why he’s a clear choice for Memphian of the Year. “I love Memphis and the spirit of Memphis,” he says. “It was either Sam Phillips or Knox Phillips that said, ‘Memphis represents the spirit of independence.’ And that’s why I love it. We’re original. We’re not trying to be like anybody else. We don’t want to be like anybody else. We just want to be the best that we can be.”